


The Very Act of Remembering

by bellatemple



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-30
Updated: 2011-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-26 19:02:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/286806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellatemple/pseuds/bellatemple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The fact that Lisa has to put her life back together is bad enough. The fact that she can't remember how it fell apart makes it all that much more difficult.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Very Act of Remembering

**Author's Note:**

> A lot has already been said meta-wise about how Lisa was treated in 6x21, but I've always preferred to work in narrative form. With thanks to [](http://butterflykiki.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**butterflykiki**](http://butterflykiki.dreamwidth.org/) for helping me work out the ending.

The first sign that something was wrong -- aside from waking up in the hospital with no idea how she got there, of course -- was when the doctor arrived and tried to check her stomach for a stab wound.

"I'm sorry," he said, incredibly flustered, when she explained that, yes, she was Lisa Braeden, but no, she hadn't been stabbed. "There seems to be some sort of paperwork mix up." He adjusted his coat and flipped through her chart rapidly, as though her proper information would just appear if he kept turning the pages. "A car accident, you said?"

"Hit my head," Lisa agreed.

He shined a pen light into both her eyes to check her pupil dilation, but seemed too flustered to do much other than agree that she must have been very lucky.

"This has never happened before." His tone was placating as he begged her not to sue without ever actually saying the words.

"I think my son and I just want to go home."

"Of course, of course." He expedited the paperwork for her discharge and promised the whole issue would get sorted out immediately. He even offered her a spare set of scrubs, as it seemed her own clothing had somehow disappeared.

The cab ride home was long and extremely expensive. She couldn't think of what reason she'd had to be this far out with Ben, but supposed it must have been important. Ben rode the whole way in silence, staring at her as though she might disappear at a moment's notice. Lisa tried to relax, figuring the splitting car-accident headache was just around the corner, but couldn't get her mind to stop whirling. She'd have to contact the police, see if the man who'd hit them had filed a report. Or if he had insurance. Find out where her car had ended up --

She'd just let that man go, no questions, hadn't even gotten his _name_ , much less his insurance information. Her mother was going to kill her.

She hoped the damage to her car wasn't too great, that the repairs wouldn't take too long, that her insurance company would cover them. She hoped she'd eventually remember what happened. Her phone had gone AWOL along with her clothes, and Ben's must have been left in the car, or she might have started on her growing list of planned phone calls right there in the back seat of the cab.

The second strange thing was her car, sitting in her driveway, not a scratch or dent on it that she hadn't seen before. The third was the police tape on the door to the house.

George came out of his house across the street just as the cab was pulling away. "Lisa!" he called. "Ben! Thank god you're alright."

Ben stared at him, pulling close to Lisa's side, and she put her arm over his shoulders.

"George. What happened?"

"I was hoping you'd tell me. You've been missing for days. We all thought the worst."

"I --" Lisa had no idea what to say. "Days?" The last thing she remembered was watching the game with Matt in the living room. "Oh my god," she breathed. "Matt."

George's face fell and he slowly shook his head. Lisa collapsed down onto the lawn, her legs folding beneath her, and pulled Ben down with her. Her body had gone numb.

"I'm so sorry." George was suddenly in front of her, crouching down. "They found him in the house. Someone broke in -- there were these symbols painted everywhere, like some kind of Satanic ritual. . . ."

"What?" Ben whispered, the first word he'd said in hours. "Mom --"

Lisa pulled him tight to her chest, pressing her face into his hair. She felt a sob bubbling up in her throat and tried to wrestle it back as her eyes prickled.

"George," she said. But she didn't know what to say next.

George held out both his hands. "Come on," he said. "Lee's making a roast. You two can stay with us until you get it all figured out."

The police came. George must have called them, or Lee. They asked question after question that neither she nor Ben could answer. It was as if the world had dropped out from under her.

"There was a man at the hospital," she told them. "He said he's the one who hit us." But when they asked for a description, she discovered all the details were gone. She could barely guess at the size of the man's frame, much less describe his face. She looked at Ben, but he shook his head. He didn't remember, either.

Post-traumatic stress, they said. Whatever the assholes who'd broken in had done to Matt, they must have done even worse to Lisa and Ben. "It'll be alright, ma'am," they said as they stood up to leave. Then: "Don't leave town."

That night, Lisa lay in the bed in George and Lee's guest room, Ben curled tight to her side, and finally let the tears come. Their lives were in shambles, and she couldn't even remember how it had happened. She didn't fall asleep until the early hours of the morning, and when she did, her dreams were full of black-eyed faces, a Ben who wasn't the Ben she'd always known, and a presence invading her mind, stealing away both her body and her life.

"You should never have left Cicero," her sister Jane told her the next day. "I know Dean had to move with his job, but you belong here. With your family."

Lisa bit her lip. "Who's Dean?"

The pause on the other end of the line left her cold.

"Your ex?" Jane said at last. "You lived with him for, like, a year."

"No," Lisa said. She felt queasy. "No, why would I. . . ?" She trailed off, the questions on her tongue too large and too numerous to make it out of her mouth.

"You should come here," Jane said, worry coating her voice like paint. "When the police finish up. I know it's not much, and Ben might not love spending that much time with his baby cousin, but we miss you. We want to help."

"We miss you, too," Lisa said. She remembered Maddie, her niece. Remembered her birth, the hours spent in the waiting room, exiled from the tiny delivery space, and the joy when she finally got her first look at the baby girl, nestled in her sister's arms. But for some reason, she couldn't remember who she and Ben had gone home to that night, who'd been waiting up with pizza and congratulatory beer. She could almost grasp it: a bewildered look as someone lifted a set of onesies Lisa was wrapping for the shower, as he caught sight of the box of butt paste Jane kept on the changing table. Lisa had laughed, she remembered. Had teased him and his wide eyes.

But she had no idea who he was.

She told the cops, when she saw them next. It seemed like it might fit, a jealous ex-lover, so cruel she'd struck him almost completely from her memory. The police nodded and sat her down with a book of mug shots, but none of them rang any bells.

"Do you have any pictures of him?" they asked, and followed her to her home as she searched, her eyes gliding past the symbol painted on the floor by the door, the salt crystals littering the base boards. She found nothing but a growing sense of unease, and a certainty that she and Ben would never be able to live in the house again.

She asked Jane if she could describe him, this man she'd spent a year of her life with, but the words seemed to skitter over the surface of Lisa's mind, too light and quick to sink in and make any impression. Jane talked to the cops, and they put out an APB. They'd find him, they said. It was top priority. Lisa hoped they were right. Even if this man wasn't responsible for what had happened, she wanted to see him. Punch him in the face, maybe, and demand to know why she couldn't remember him.

Time passed. Lisa's nightmares never quite went away, but they came more rarely now. Ben still stuck close to her side and never said much, just stared out at the world like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. She tried talking to him about it, but found the words got stopped up in her own throat. She didn't know what she'd have done if it weren't for Lee and George, who tempted Ben away whenever it all got too much for Lisa, got him outside to help with their cars -- Ben had developed quite an interest and even some skill with them seemingly out of nowhere -- or sat down with him to play Rock Band on Lee's treasured X-Box. Ben had always been a big video game fan, but these days, he refused to go near anything that involved guns. But he knew all the words to all the classic rock songs.

With no leads and no information other than Lisa's mysterious ex, the police finally agreed that Lisa and Ben could leave town. Jane came over to help sort through those of their things the police weren't asking to keep as evidence, and while George and Lee took Ben to a baseball game, the sisters crossed the street and attacked the house, armed with stackable plastic boxes.

They hadn't collected much since moving in. Jane said it must have been because they moved so often, then looked away when Lisa didn't immediately know what she was talking about. She remembered the handful of houses she'd rented in the last few months once she thought about it, and Lisa was proud to note that only one of them had a giant, mystery-man sized hole in the middle, though the others had occasional blank spots as well.

"Did I ever mention him coming back?" she asked Jane. "Was he stalking me?"

Jane shook her head. "You kept saying it was all totally amiable," she said. "That you two agreed you had different priorities." She swallowed, staring down at the box in her hands. "I kind of liked him. He was quiet sometimes, but he was great with Maddie and Ben."

"That's what they always say." Lisa knelt down in front of the small bookcase in Ben's room, pulling books out and stacking them in one of the empty boxes. "Isn't it? ‘He seemed like a nice guy, just really quiet.'"

Jane sighed. "Yeah. Yeah it is."

They continued packing in silence. Lisa pulled the last book from Ben's shelf, some encyclopedia of monsters she didn't remember ever seeing before. She gave it a quick flip through, wondering where he might have picked it up, and a photo fell out, landing face down on the floor. She set the book into the box, then picked the photo up.

Lisa didn't notice when the photo slipped from nerveless fingers, or when she sank down to the hardwood floor. Her whole head buzzed, pieces flitting in and out at high speed, a rare smile here, a late night there, a backyard barbecue, a late night visit. Tense shoulders, the face turned away. Hands on Ben, shoving him out of the way.

 _Dean._

It seemed as though a hand pressed down on her forehead, easing the tension that had lingered there since she'd first woken up in the hospital. Lisa took a deep breath, staring up into a pair of blue eyes, cold and still as a mid-winter lake. She blinked, and the cold melted away. She was looking at her sister.

"Lisa," Jane was saying. She'd picked the photo up and held it out, finger tapping firmly on the face behind Ben's in the image. "That's him. That's Dean, do you remember? Lisa? Lisa!"

Lisa took the photo with shaking hands, pressing her thumb over Dean's face in the image. The flickering bits of memory went by too fast to keep hold of, but that was alright. She didn't try. She placed the photo back between the pages of the book it'd fallen out of, then tossed the book into the "donations" box without looking.

Jane sighed softly. "For a minute there," she said, "I thought maybe you'd remembered."

For a minute there, Lisa almost had. She shook her head, then offered Jane a small smile. "It's okay," she said. She pushed herself slowly to her feet, shaking out her hands. She felt empty, like she'd been rinsed clean of something gritty and discoloring. "I'm okay." She looked around Ben's room one more time. They weren't anywhere near done clearing it out, but Lisa felt so detached from it all. She nudged one of the boxes with her foot.

"Let's get some lunch or something," she said. "I'm hungry. Are you hungry?"

Jane looked as though she didn't want to make any sudden moves. She nodded. "Yeah. I could eat. But what about the rest of this stuff?"

"Leave it." Lisa decided. "I don't want any of it. I don't want anything more to do with this house or this town or any of it. I want to start over."

"Okay," said Jane. "Okay, we can do that."

The first sign that things could be right again was the look on Ben's face when she told him it was finally time for them to leave. He didn't even care that they weren't bringing any of their things. George and Lee said they'd sort through the house for them, and Lisa thanked them, but knew she'd only tell them to sell or donate it all. She gave them two big hugs each and her forwarding address, and as she and Ben were heading out the door for the last time, Lee pulled her aside.

"What about _him?_ " he asked. "He knows Jane. He could find you."

Lisa gently pulled his hand off her arm. "Let him come," she said. "Let him try it. I'm done. I'm not going to let him control our lives any more."

And as she stepped down off the front porch, she knew it was true. Dean was gone, whomever and whatever he'd been to them. And he wasn't coming back. She wouldn't let him.

She looked up at the sky, a deep, cloudless blue, and imagined there were eyes there looking down upon her. She smiled back at them. She didn't know why she'd forgotten a year or more of her life, but she did know she had to try not to let it control her. It wasn't fine, just yet, but it would be. It could be.

She didn't want to remember Dean, anyway.


End file.
